by Brett King
“Maybe General Delgado gave the green light to Operation Overshadow based on corrupted intel. Someone claimed that Zaki valued the Radix, then took it a step further. Maybe they falsified a link between Zaki and the WIB.”
“DIRNSA isn’t going to be happy to hear that someone gave him corrupt intel.”
“He’s not going to hear it.”
Her mouth curled in surprise. “You’re kidding. We have to tell Delgado.”
“Not until I can figure out who gave Delgado faulty intelligence about Zaki. A dozen people had their fingerprints on this mission. Telling DIRNSA might tip them off.”
“You think so?”
“If Delgado knows, he’ll initiate an investigation to find the source. By then, it could be too late. If we deliver the relic to General Delgado and the source hears about an investigation, we run the risk of the Radix falling into the wrong hands.” Brynstone fought a disquieting feeling. He didn’t have all the answers, but something felt wrong. Until he discovered the truth, he had to take action. “Jordan, do you trust me?”
“More than anyone I know. What’s your plan?”
“We’ll land in Baltimore, but we’re not taking the Radix to Delgado’s NSA office at Fort Meade. I need to consult a colleague. He worked for the NSA before you transferred over.”
“What if your colleague is the one who gave compromised intel?”
“He knows about the Radix, but nothing about Zaki. We need to go dark after we land so I can talk to him. We can’t let Delgado know what we’re doing. Trust me on that.”
Chapter Fourteen
Washington, D.C.
11:25 P.M.
Deena slipped on a white robe bearing the White House emblem, then moved to the adjacent Lincoln Sitting Room. She curled on an overstuffed Victorian sofa. With a view of the roaring fireplace, she checked e-mail on her Black-Berry. A journalist had contacted her for an interview for BioPharm International magazine. A Merck colleague sent gossip that the FDA had denied Pfizer fast-track status on a new cholesterol drug. Then she came across an e-mail from Pantera. Deena never guessed she’d put this kind of faith in a stranger, but Pantera was impressive. Call it intuition, but she trusted her contact.
Pantera had e-mailed Deena a text message from a cell phone. Although brief, it was what she had been waiting to hear.
We think the scientist found Radix. Will get it from him soon. Have funds avail to secure sale of Radix. ttys
She jumped when a knock came at the door. She scrambled off the sofa, then headed back into the Lincoln Bedroom to answer it.
Leaning against the doorframe, Dillon Armstrong gave a sneaky smile. “Mind if I come in?” He peeked back at the Secret Service agent in the East Sitting Hall before stepping inside.
“Does your brother know you’re here?”
“Last I knew, he was busy reading bedtime stories.” Dillon tossed his coat over the back of a Victorian slipper chair. “You might not believe this, Deena, but I want to apologize. I was a little biting out on the South Portico.”
“I know how much Taft-Ryder means to you. It was your first big success in the pharmaceutical industry. You want to see it succeed.”
“I’ve always been good about keeping my personal life and my corporate life separate. Doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. The separation with Brooke has been eating on me.”
“Maybe this will help.” She read aloud the text message from Pantera.
“Good. When do we make the exchange?”
“In a matter of hours, I hope.”
“Look, Deena, if you’re comfortable with this acquisition process, that’s good enough for me. I’ve placed funds in an account in a Luxembourg bank.” Dillon grabbed his coat. “Let’s go to my place. I’ll give you the account number.”
“You won’t regret this,” she answered. “I promise.”
11:35 P.M.
The Knight pressed binoculars to his face as he peered through the Mercedes’s windshield. Along with his assistant and two security operators, he scanned the area around the National Cathedral. He’d spotted the sinner here four nights ago.
Floodlights splashed ethereal light on the cobblestone square. A figure emerged on the snowy sidewalk outside the Gothic cathedral.
“There’s the homeless man,” the Knight said, his mouth curling into a smile. “He looks cold.”
“The guy in the long coat?” Max Cress asked, staring through night-vision binoculars.
“That’s him. He’s perfect.”
The man ambled down Wisconsin Avenue. Dressed in an oversized coat and grimy sweatpants, he wore a knit cap over long greasy hair. His fingers peeked through tattered gloves as he pushed a rusty shopping cart crammed with garbage bags and aluminum cans.
“Here’s the plan,” the Knight said. “Cress and Weber, I want you to keep an eye on him. He stays close to the Bishop’s Garden this time of night. You’ll need to wait until after the midnight candlelight service is over. If it looks clear, send the team to pick him up. I don’t care if you wait half the night. And be certain we don’t have an eyewitness.”
“Want him delivered to the house?” Cress asked.
“Of course. Get him a shower. Trim his beard into a forked shape at the chin, but not too close. After that, feed him.”
“What will you do to him?”
“He is a sinner begging for redemption,” the Knight said. “I have been sent to save him.”
Baltimore
Midnight
Alone in her darkened hospital room, Cori Cassidy snapped open her eyes. She listened for a moment, hearing a staff person outside her bedroom. Relaxing again, she snuggled inside her blanket, basking in a cocoon of warmth. She diverted her thoughts to Tessa Richardson. Cori’s roommate couldn’t fly home for the holidays because she was writing her doctoral dissertation. At least Tessa wasn’t stuck in a psych hospital.
Cori replayed her conversation with the patient known as Leonardo. Gave her chills when she thought about his words: the Tree of Life blossoms in the Land of the Dead. She worried that her conversation with the man would trigger a recurring dream.
Her nightmare played out the same way every time. In the dream, Ariel Cassidy explained from her deathbed that she was about to die. In the next blurry second, Cori found herself inside the Princeton University Chapel, peering into her mother’s casket. The coffin was always empty. She spied her dead mother watching from beneath the chapel’s stained glass science window. She glided to Cori, then whispered in her ear. After that, Ariel Cassidy climbed into her casket. The lid closed. The dream ended. It always happened that way.
She could count on the dream whenever bad things happened. If she was having relationship trouble, she had the dream. Or if someone was sick or dying. Or when her father started dating Yvette. Ethan Cassidy had met her at his law firm. Half his age, Yvette was a brunette with huge fake boobs who seemed obsessed with his money. Her father had to move on with his life. She just wished he had waited more than three months after her mother’s passing.
Everything had soured during a family vacation. After her dad had gone to bed, she caught Yvette dancing with younger guys at a club. Big turnoff. The next morning, Cori called her on it. Yvette stopped speaking to her. At Thanksgiving, her dad had announced a Christmas trip to the Fiji Islands with Yvette and Jared, Cori’s younger brother. The catch? She wasn’t invited. That was totally fine, except Cori missed spending the holidays with Jared.
The next day, she signed up for Professor Berta’s experiment.
Cori didn’t want to dream about her mother in this place, but she sensed the nightmare would come anyway. And as always, Ariel Cassidy would whisper the same words before climbing into her casket: the Tree of Life blossoms in the Land of the Dead.
Chapter Fifteen
Airborne over Colorado
10:06 P.M.
Brynstone was ready to take a chance. He needed to go dark after landing in Baltimore. Would the risk pay off?
Talking
to Jordan, his voice lowered. “The Radix has power. I saw that firsthand tonight. That’s why the House of Borgia wants it.”
She frowned. “It’s hard to believe they’re still out there.”
“Believe it,” he answered. “They hunger for the Radix.”
The Borgias’ obsession with the Radix stretched back more than five centuries. Before Cesare Borgia died in 1507, he made his oldest child, Domenico, take a blood oath to reclaim the lost Radix. Domenico Borgia’s mother was a Ferrarese nun who had died giving birth to her son in 1495. Raised in secrecy by Cesare’s sister, Lucrezia, the illegitimate child was nurtured on stories about the relic that had once belonged to his grandfather, Pope Alexander VI. Along with two of Lucrezia’s surviving children, Domenico had dedicated himself to regaining the relic. Domenico’s children and several cousins had inherited the clan’s passion.
Their quest sparked tension with skeptical family members, including Francis Borgia, later canonized in 1671. Despite the rift, Domenico Borgia’s descendents continued their search. Over centuries, their obsession for the Radix bordered on fanaticism. The latest generation had even returned to Cesare Borgia’s ruthless and bloodthirsty ways.
Brynstone placed the stone box on the table. He pointed to the image engraved on the cista mystica’s lid. “See that? It matches a plant symbol in the Voynich manuscript. It tells me our work isn’t over.” He leaned back. “We can’t understand the power of the Radix until we consult an expert on the Voynich manuscript.”
“Explain that,” Jordan said. “How does it fit in?”
“In 1912,” he began, “an American book dealer and collector named Wilfrid Voynich visited a Jesuit college at the Villa Mondragone in Frascati, Italy. While searching the monastery’s antique manuscripts, he discovered a book written in an unknown language. The pages were filled with a bizarre enciphered script and cryptic watercolors of unfamiliar plants, unknown astronomical constellations, and naked women immersed in tubs of green liquid.”
“Back up a sec,” she interrupted. “Did you say, ‘naked women in tubs’?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Pretty strange.”
“Everything about it is strange. It has been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world. It’s in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.”
“When was it written?”
“It’s not clear. Past speculation placed it anywhere between 1450 and 1600. For more than a century, people have tried to decipher its meaning. It’s cryptology’s Holy Grail. No one could crack it. Until recently.”
“Someone figured it out?”
He nodded. “The VMS consists of five sections in an alphabetic script of nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none bearing a relationship to any known letter system. Computer analysis of the VMS revealed two distinct ‘languages’ or ‘dialects’ of Voynichese, called Voynich A and Voynich B. Most of it is nonsensical, designed to throw off cryptologists.”
She tilted her head. “This is wild.”
“A British cognitive scientist thinks it was written using a sixteenth-century device called the Cardan grille. It’s a card cut with window slits you place over a text table containing suffixes, infixes, and prefixes. You can create an endless constellation of syllables to design new words. Some think it contains meaningless words. The colleague I mentioned earlier? He’s a Voynich expert. He deciphered clues embedded in the rule-based language in the fourth section and parts of the first and third sections.”
“Who wrote the VMS?”
“It’s been attributed to everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to the English scholar Roger Bacon.” He stretched his legs. “My colleague has a different idea.”
“Who does he think wrote it?”
“Raphael della Rovere.”
Her green eyes sparkled with realization. “Serious? The priest who mummified Friar Zanchetti more than five hundred years ago?”
Trained as a physician, Raphael della Rovere became a priest in 1496. A Franciscan from Florence, he became a respected medical historian and scholar of Hebraic classics. He was also a thief. In 1502, della Rovere smuggled the Radix out of the Vatican. Months before his theft, Cesare Borgia had stolen the relic from an aging cardinal named Pierre d’Aubusson. Known as the Shield of the Church, d’Aubusson was the grand master of the Sovereign Military Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, a group originally known as the Knights Hospitaller. In a secret 1476 ceremony, the knights had appointed d’Aubusson as the Keeper of the Radix.
A quarter century later, Cesare Borgia learned about the relic, traveled to Rhodes, and attacked d’Aubusson. As Pope Alexander VI’s son, Borgia drew on Vatican favors to escape with the Radix before the Knights of Saint John captured him. Borgia returned to the Vatican and delivered the Radix to his father. The delighted Pope commissioned scholars to study the relic, but none could decipher its secret. The Pope knew the Radix was valuable, but he could not unlock its power. In desperation, the Vatican summoned della Rovere, who was regarded as an eccentric but brilliant thinker. It was a bitter decision for the Pope. Raphael della Rovere was the nephew of Borgia’s most aggressive rival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere.
After months locked in a Vatican library, della Rovere discovered the true meaning of the Radix ipsius. He feared if he shared the secrets of the Radix with the Vatican, the Pope would abuse its power for personal gain. Following the death of his wife, della Rovere was more willing to take chances. Under cover of darkness, the priest stole the relic from the Vatican Library. A furious Pope Alexander VI sent his bloodthirsty son to find him. At the time, Cesare Borgia was the Duke of Valentinois and captain general of the papal army.
Della Rovere considered returning the Radix to the Order of Saint John, but decided that Borgia might steal it again. With the Pope’s militia closing in, he concealed the relic in a secure place. Although Borgia never revealed where he found the priest, he returned without the Radix. Borgia didn’t know della Rovere had hidden it inside Lorenzo Zanchetti’s mummy.
After his mummification in 1502, Zanchetti was buried beneath the Church of San Sebastiano in the Italian village of Navelli. His corpse was forgotten until the church floor collapsed, revealing catacombs containing more than two hundred mummies. When Brynstone learned Friar Zanchetti was among the uncovered mummies, he took the next flight to central Italy. He’d arrived in the Tuscany highlands to learn that the mummy had been stolen the previous day and vanished on the black market. A member from the House of Saud purchased the Italian monk in July. Three months later, Brynstone learned Prince Zaki had transported the mummy to Aspen. Since then, he’d been planning for this night.
“After decoding the Voynich manuscript, my friend learned the cista mystica was concealed inside the Zanchetti mummy.”
“Della Rovere mentioned that in the Voynich manuscript?”
“Alluded to it in code. We filled in the gaps.” He pointed to the engraved image on the box. “That mystery plant appears in section one of the VMS.”
“John, I shared that I trusted you. Do you trust me?”
“Of course.”
“Then can I see the Radix?”
“I should warn you,” he said, pushing the stone box across the table. “It may not contain what you expect.”
“Can you be any more cryptic?” Jordan joked, running a hand through her hair as she stared at the cista mystica.
“Go ahead,” he urged. “Open it.”
After shooting a quick glance at him, she opened the lid, then peeked inside the stone box. She yelped, slapping the lid closed as she jumped back in revulsion.
“My God,” she gasped. “Is that a human finger?”
“Belongs to Friar Zanchetti.”
“That’s impossible,” she said, flipping the lid open again. The muscles around her mouth curled in disgust. “Zanchetti died five hundred years ago. That finger looks pink, like it was severed from a living person.”
“Surprised me too,” he admitted. “I had no
idea what the Radix could do until I saw Zanchetti’s mummy.”
“I don’t get it. The finger is the Radix?”
“The Radix is beneath it.” He opened the medic kit and found latex gloves. Stretching them over his hands, he reached inside the stone box. He placed Zanchetti’s ring finger on a specimen bag. The fingertip was wrapped in aging brown cloth. “Look inside the box.”
She peeked in. A look of awe came over her face as she studied the Radix. “It’s amazing,” she whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like it. But what’s with the finger? Why’d della Rovere store it in the mystic coffin?”
“Good question.” He examined the finger, then unraveled the cloth. Finding a scalpel in the medic kit, he wedged the blade beneath the fingernail.
“Geez,” Jordan groaned. “You’re not seriously ripping off the nail?”
“Now I know why you dropped out of med school.” He wiggled the scalpel, then lifted the fingernail from the skin.
She rolled her eyes. “Truly gross.”
“Paleopathology isn’t always pretty.” Brynstone squinted at the nail. “Della Rovere scratched a message beneath Zanchetti’s fingernail. He placed the nail back on the finger, then wrapped it. After five centuries, it adhered.”
Jordan scrunched her nose. “Why would he do that?”
“He wanted to hide it where people wouldn’t think to look.”
“Those are symbols,” she said, squinting at the fingernail’s underside.
“A Voynich B cipher,” he added. “Hopefully, my friend will know what it means.”
Chapter Sixteen
Washington, D.C.
12:46 A.M.
